The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Mr. Welbeck jolted his attaché case to stop two or three renegade exercise books from falling out, then observed: “Barton Cunningham. A talented young mathematician in his way, especially in the more practical aspects of the subject. Please send him my regards when you next see him.”

  He obviously hadn’t taken in his being a colleague of mine whom I would see that very day, indeed would sit beside for three or four unbroken hours.

  “He spoke well of your textbook,” I said. I had of course now determined to raise the subject of the Fullers but thought I should do in the gentlest way.

  “How very kind of him. Of which one in particular?”

  I couldn’t very well reply that Barton had spoken in the singular only, but fortunately Azariah Welbeck—who had now swiveled his head back and was looking straight before him with unswerving eyes, so that addressing him was rather like parleying with a horse—exclaimed: “Oh, how forgetful I have become! My second book—the one on the non-Euclidean geometers—principally Russians, believe it or not—didn’t appear until sometime after he had left the Coll.”

  I had no difficulty in believing that Russia might produce non-Euclidian geometers, since up till this moment I was unaware of these folk’s very existence.

  “Yes,” I risked, “it was the other one of yours that Barton likes so much.” Then fearing that our exchanges might turn too particular and mathematical, I went on, “And then I think we have other people in common, sir. The Fullers. I am a lodger at Castelaniene.”

  At these words Mr. Welbeck came to a stop. Had he actually been a cab-horse, you would have thought his driver had tugged hard at his reins. He swung his head ’round to look at me, making his white mane shake. “Are you really, Mr., er—”

  “Bridges,” I supplied, maybe a bit too hastily.

  “Bridges. I had indeed heard that Beatrice Fuller was now taking in paying guests, but I live here in Kingsbarrow not Dengate, you see, so I do not always hear all that town’s news.”

  “You did not come on the Swots’ Express then?”

  Mr. Welbeck gave a little rattling laugh. “So you even know our local train’s nickname. What a tenacious young journalist you must be! No, every day in term-time I wait for it to pull into Kingsbarrow Station, whereupon I leave my own house—and my wife and daughter and three Airedale dogs—and then join this happy band all the way to the Coll.”

  This admission warmed me to him. “Yes,” I went on, “I am one of those paying guests, you see, and a very pleasant household it is.”

  Now Mr. Welbeck swung his head away from me, and resumed walking. “I am glad to hear that, for your sake,” he said, “I cannot judge whether the household would or would not be pleasant, for I have never visited it, I am afraid.” Something—could it be described as a chill?—had entered his cultured, gentle, gravelly voice to make me think that he was not in truth “afraid” of this last fact at all, that he had no intention of going to Castelaniene, no more than Susan Hough had, and that, like my editor’s wife, he did not like the owner of the house. Had the matter of Horace Fuller’s crime created an irreparable chasm between Mr. Welbeck and the boy’s parents?

  “Mrs. Fuller tends to keep herself to herself,” I said, though I wasn’t sure that this remark was accurate, for after all she was a member of the Gateway, to which any amount of solitude would, in my view, be preferable. “What with her husband’s tragic death, and her son’s . . .” I didn’t quite know what noun would be most appropriate here, especially as I wanted to avoid at all costs the word “disappearance,” and had just wondered whether “absence” might be the best choice, when Mr. Welbeck spared me further pains by saying:

  “That was a sad business, that was. Very sad!”

  “Well, theft is usually a sad—” I began, to be brought up short before I’d come to the end of my little platitude.

  “Theft?” The schoolmaster spoke the word sharply and loudly, so much so that a number of boys looked in his direction. “Who called it that? Cunningham, I suppose.”

  I could have bitten my tongue out. Mr. Welbeck’s eyes peering through the thick lenses were perfectly focused now, and on my own self, and their interrogative glare made me suddenly see him for what in fact he was: a figure of authority with the power and ability to reprove any erring or lazy boy.

  “No, no,” I assured him hastily, anxious not to calumniate my colleague, “it’s probably me who’s misunderstood.”

  “There were malicious tongues a-plenty only too pleased to brand the boy’s action as precisely that, but I didn’t know they were still at their foul work. Borrow money from me the boy did, even if without asking me. He left in my wallet a note explaining and apologizing for his deed and promising to repay me every farthing. As I am sure he would have done, I wasn’t in the least worried, but then—then his own father got him into trouble for doing precisely the same thing to himself—removing cash but declaring his good honest intentions! Why my late colleague chose to treat his son as he did is quite beyond my comprehension, and always has been.”

  Feeling and indignation were not just apparent, they had momentarily taken over this gentle individual, whose sentences, so unexpected in content and emotion, assailed me like darts hurled at a board.

  I was moved to say, “I am truly sorry, sir; I spoke completely out of turn. I probably was not attending properly to the little history Barton told me.”

  Mr. Welbeck sighed, then smiled, and was, I think, about to pat me on the back before thinking better of it; I was a stranger to him when all was said and done.

  “I don’t suppose you did misunderstand or mishear,” he said. “The whole Cunningham family is addicted to gossip, I’m afraid. But because you are living at Mrs. Fuller’s, whither Horace may return, one still hopes, I felt I ought to put the record right for you. I always liked young Fuller, you see, a most unusual boy. He is one of Nature’s democrats, I do honestly believe”—that phrase again! Barton’s own!—“and there are few enough of those around, in all truth. Always had a kind word for those who worked here, no matter in how humble a capacity. There was one little maid—Mary, her name was—whom he always stopped to talk to, even made things out of little odds-and-ends so she could put them in her room or on her person, threaded empty bird-shells or acorns on pieces of colored string. That sort of thing! And he never got praised for all his thoughtfulness.”

  So far today Mary’s connection with St. Stephen’s had clean gone out of my head. It was perhaps rather crass of me never to have wondered whether she had known Horace before his mysterious disappearance, for how could she not have done? Other people, other events in the past and present had somehow occluded Horace in my mind. The decidedly disconcerting picture of Mrs. Fuller sitting in the Mercy Room on Friday afternoon surrounded by objects bought for her son’s delectation but rejected by him came to mind: “He wasn’t contented here,” she’d said, “in fact he was discontented, in the end nearly all the time. Many a boy would have given his eye-teeth to have only a fraction of what you can find in this room, but not Horace. He cared for none of it.”

  And now the buildings of St. Stephen’s College, where Horace Fuller had prospered so ill, but of which so many members past and present were so vocally proud, were toweringly upon us. So commanding are these that I think any visitor to Kingsbarrow would feel himself a dull failure had he not ended his walk up the village High Street with passing under the tiled lych-gate into its front quadrangle, the first of a consecutive sequence of three. Not to do this would be to put yourself in the ranks of the lowly, the uneducated, even the unworthy. The solemn, geometric, red-brick domain ahead was daunting and compelling in about equal measures, and I have to add that members of the boatered, blazered throng entered their destination in a happy enough spirit, as though it were one they were proud to be part of, and happy enough, too.

  “A charming sight on a morning such as this,” said the weak-eyed mathematics master, though, for all my reactions to the place indicated above, thi
s would not have been my own epithet. Charming was Lucinda teaching the ragamuffins about flowers and trees, was the Houghs playing croquet, was idlers on the sea-front, was—yes, admit it—Hans coming into my bed at night. This place was too hard, too dominant, not to say domineering.

  “What time, may I ask,” Mr. Welbeck was inquiring, “is your assignment with Mr. Whittington?”

  “Ten o’clock, sir!”

  Was it my uneasy conscience or did Mr. Welbeck’s face express surprise that I had chosen to come on the Swots’ Express rather than later?

  “Then you have plenty of time on your hands, and as a keen young journalist you would surely wish to get acquainted with the establishment which will be the subject of your pen. I am sure The Advertiser would expect you to do so, and now I come to think about it, I think our headmaster himself, speaking to me after chapel yesterday, expressed the hope that you could have a good look ’round before seeing him.”

  “That was most gracious of him!” I didn’t care for the word I’d just used; horribly, it just slipped out of me. But it produced the kindliest of smiles on my White Knight’s creased, pleasant, blurry-eyed countenance.

  “Then allow me to find one of the older and abler boys—a Sixth-Former, a Prefect—to show you ’round. So proud are we at the college of our architecture,” and he gestured toward the unhomely red piles, once again nearly causing exercise books to topple out of his attaché case, “that we exempt certain of our seniors from chapel or assembly or even from classes if they can make themselves useful as guides to interested visitors, whose presence means a lot to us.”

  “I would like that, sir!” I said. Well, it might help a bit with my article, mightn’t it?

  “Please then to stay where you are, and I will bring a Prefect to you just as soon as I can find one for the task.”

  “Azzy is the very nicest of men.” Barton’s laudatory statement was indubitably being confirmed. There he was, an unworldly man living quietly with his family and dogs, giving himself to the education of the young at a highly prestigious school, and writing important educational books (for so I thought they must be), who was prepared to bestir himself on behalf of a stranger. Besides his niceness had also been displayed to strange-sounding Horace Fuller, and was exercised to this day on his memory and reputation. He’d even recalled him stringing acorns, to form a kind of necklace, presumably, for the benefit of—the vehicle Mary. How that girl popped up in the most seemingly incongruous places! Connecting death and life, you might say—and there were those I’d met who would use that very phrase of her!

  And here came back Azzy with my guide to St. Stephen’s College in tow. Making the older man look even more like Tenniel’s drawing come to life, white untidy hair still whiter and untidier, thick specs thicker, awkward gait more lumbering, this St. Stephen’s prefect moved toward me with an ease of movement which also suggested a young soldier’s disciplined straightness of body. His blazer and boater, though clearly designating the same establishment as those of other boys, were readily distinguishable from theirs. On his boater-band the stripes were narrower and the blue of a different, lighter hue, this variant of blue repeated in the trimming of the otherwise dark-blue blazer. Obviously here was a very superior being indeed!

  “I have brought a very well-informed young Virgil to meet the requirements of your almost equally young Dante,” said Mr. Wellbeck, “and, Mr.—” but he’d already forgotten my name. “I have made, I may say, a first-class choice. But let neither of you compare the place you walk through with Dante’s original. That would not do at all.” He emitted a rattle-like chuckle, and, uneducated as I was, only later did I understand he had jocularly referred to the Inferno. “So leaving you in these capable hands I bid you farewell.” And awkwardly he turned on his ill-shod heels and left the prefect and me, a little shyly, to confront each other.

  It was the St. Stephensite, of course, who spoke first. His immediately palpable physical self-possession was disconcerting, as was his particular brand of good looks besides which Will Postgate would have looked flashy, if not vulgar. “Well, Mr.—?”

  “Bridges!”

  “Mr. Bridges, Azzy—that is, Mr. Welbeck—says you have to see our Headmaster at ten o’clock, and that I should escort you in person to his study. Therefore, we have a fair bit of time in front of us, but I doubt it will be long enough to do justice to all the Coll has to offer. Are there any sights you particularly wish to be shown?”

  “No, I leave things entirely to you,” I said. In addition to being an important member of this community, he seemed, thanks to his pervasive self-confidence, rather older than myself, even though he also had much of the classical golden youth about him: fair hair springing back from the forehead, aquiline nose, long-lashed scabious-blue eyes, cupid’s bow mouth, pink-and-white hairless facial skin (though I came to see two tiny tufts of fair stubble, one to the right of his upper lip, another at the base of his chin), broad shoulders, long, strong arms. Compared with him, I couldn’t help thinking, what a sandy, scrubby little chap I must appear!

  “The most important place in the entire Coll is, of course, the Chapel,” announced the prefect in a suitably prefectorial voice, clear, firm, already deep-broken, but quiet-toned. “On Mondays the Headmaster starts the day with an Assembly through which he outlines the Coll’s activities for the week ahead; otherwise we commence each day with a full service, a fuller one still, it goes without saying, on Sundays or feast days. So you are fortunate in having elected to come today on behalf of your paper if you want an undisturbed view of the heart of St. Stephen’s.”

  Was I now! I was distinctly nonplussed by this little speech (for it surely was that) but replied to it breezily enough: “Right ho, then! Let’s go there.”

  My guide did not budge, however. “Our visitors generally think it best to have the Chapel as the culmination of their tour. They can then avail themselves for a few minutes of its consecrated peace.” A roundabout way presumably of saying that they could pray there? “I recommend we follow this course. I just wanted you to take in the Chapel before we proceed elsewhere. It was completed fifteen years ago to designs by the eminent architect, William Butterfield, though of course we used a local firm of builders for the greater part of the task, Messrs. Robinson and Forsyth of Dengate. Mr. Butterworth’s patron, and our own too, Mr. Beresford Hope found the result eminently satisfying.”

  It will not produce any astonishment in my readers that these names, so proudly uttered by this youth, were no more familiar to me than the Norwegian ones I have given earlier. Had I been interested in church matters (or known anybody well who was), had I been a real resident of Kent where he wielded such influence (even though he was Independent Conservative MP for Cambridge University), I would certainly have known about Beresford Hope (then living near Canterbury to die two years later), irrepressible parliamentary voice on religious affairs, often on behalf of his own Ecclesiastical Society and taking in their legal, architectural, and educational aspects, and the eminence behind the chain of Woodard Schools of Anglo-Catholic persuasion to which St. Stephen’s itself belonged. But all this meant no more to me than the strange gods of the Kvens whom bo’sun Alfred Johnston had spoken of to Hans. So what could I say to my present guide but “That’s good to hear”? The prefect looked mildly surprised (and disapproving?) at this, and doubtless at once got the measure of my educational and cultural level.

  Anyway, he displayed little stronger than indifference to me as a person (even when I brought up the name of The Advertiser, which I did several times), masking, I thought, a certain (mild) disdain. Was it my clothes? My voice, my intonation, my way of walking? These ignominious doubts punctuated my whole time in his company until its strange conclusion, when my attitude changed, as readers will see. And that uncomfortable queasiness stayed in my intestines, shifting its precise location every so often, to send nausea rippling through me anew. And this on a fine morning in an atmosphere promoting and bespeaking vigorous health, for
as my “inspection” (to use his curiously technical word) progressed, I saw many groups of boys making their orderly ways to appointed places, a number of whom inclined their heads deferentially to my guide, and how well set-up they all appeared, but how he eclipsed even the best-looking of them!

  The tour began right in the very quad in which we were standing, with the old oak tree there. Planted apparently in 1701, it is encircled by a bench attached by iron-work to its vast, knobby bole.

  “Only those of us who have earned School Colors can sit on it,” the prefect said, with dignified pride. “We find it pleasant to be seated on a summer afternoon conning our books or talking over the finer points of a match with the leafy branches shading our heads. The sight of us can be quite an inspiration, I like to think, to younger boys like my own frater who will want in their turn to try for their colors.”

  Oddly this remark didn’t sound as conceited as it does when I write it down. The oak tree—it features in many a book on Kent—stood in the quad dominated by the one old building in the complex; School House, originally Kingsbarrow Manor, built in 1578 in the then fashionable shape of an E (after Queen Elizabeth) and of a darker red than its neighbors, deepened by the centuries. Here I was shown the Refectory-cum-Prep Room, with long trestle-tables and a hammer-beam roof, and the School Colors’ Den, whose name perhaps explains itself.

  In the Library where we went next he asked me to admire sets of Gibbon and Samuel Johnson bestowed on the College by a “nameless benefactor.”

  “That benefactor is my father,” the prefect told me in a subdued but matter-of-fact manner, “but he naturally does not wish this to be known. The library also has a quiet corner, to the back of the dictionaries section, which, like the bench ’round the oak, is reserved for those who have School Colors. The Corner, as we call it quite simply, can again act as an example to others. Also”—and here he could not restrain from a little smile of undisguised pleasure, which revealed, for a second, even in the hushed, shady gravity of this well-stocked library, something quite animal in him—“also we can keep an eye from it on anyone misbehaving, and deal with him—or them—accordingly.”